From the preface:
…I hope that these letters, which were shown me by the writer’s husband many years after they were written, will give a faint idea of the life of a Chinese lady. They were written by Kwei-li, the wife of a very high Chinese official, to her husband when he accompanied his mater, Prince Chung, on this trip around the world.
She was the daughter of a viceroy of Chih-li, a man most advanced for his time, who was one of the forerunners of the present educational movement in China, a movement which has caused her youth to rise and demand Western methods and Western enterprise in place of the obsolete traditions and customs of their ancestors.
